The positive effects of angiogenesis drugs to treat the deadly brain tumors called glioblastomas are due to edema reduction and not from any direct effect of anti-tumor, as per researchers from the Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH).

It was remarked by Rakesh K. Jain, PhD, director of the Steele Laboratory in the MGH Department of Radiation Oncology, the study’s co-senior author that the findings hinted at the fact that antiangiogenesis therapy can prove effective for improving patient survival rate even in cases of persistent tumor growth.

Mice treated with cediranib were found to have significant reductions in the size and permeability of tumor-associated blood vessels, compared with animals that did not receive the drug. Although treatment did not reduce the rate of tumor growth, mice receiving cediranib lived significantly longer than the control animals. Another group of tumor-bearing mice received the steroid drug most commonly used to treat edema, and though those animals also lived longer than controls, the survival benefit was greater for the mice receiving cediranib.

“This is the first paper to show that vascular normalization alone, without chemotherapy, can be effective against some tumors by controlling edema and that this anti-edema effect is better than that of currently used steroids,” Jain says. “Unfortunately, these anti-VEGF agents did not slow the tumor growth rate in these models; and since recurrent glioblastomas are highly resistant to currently used chemotherapy drugs, even if vascular normalization increases drug delivery, there may be little or no additional increase in patient survival. We urgently need to find better anti-tumor and anti-angiogenic agents.”

The study was supported by grants from the National Institutes of Health, the Susan G. Komen Foundation, the Damon Runyon Foundation, the U.S. Department of Defense, the Montesi Family Research Fund and AstraZeneca Pharmaceuticals, which manufactures cediranib under the brand name RECENTIN.